How far off are Flash Based Hard Drives?

[Omega]

Umm, is that true? Now im no expert but, how on earth could a 33MB/s bus even with the SSD drive compare in speed terms to the 3GB/s SATA2 with the fastest plater based drive? You might obviously get a quicker reply from the device but wouldn't it be bottle necked by the bus so much as to cancel any performance gain?

Assuming top speeds on both drives:

The SSD would need ATA166 (I am guessing).

But here's the thing, platter based drives are slow as hell. You would get better real world performance from a SSD on ATA33. (However I don't suggest running it this low).

Also, the bottleneck on the SSD would be bus-side, whereas the bottleneck on the HDD is drive-side...

If you're really concerned, get a SATA SSD. Problem solved.

[Airbozo]

Umm, is that true? Now im no expert but, how on earth could a 33MB/s bus even with the SSD drive compare in speed terms to the 3GB/s SATA2 with the fastest plater based drive? You might obviously get a quicker reply from the device but wouldn't it be bottle necked by the bus so much as to cancel any performance gain?

It is true. And your assumption about the bus bottlenecking the drive is also true. One of those ssd'd will flood a 3gb sata controller. I have yet to see a sata drive actually do a 3gb/sec burst. I am testing some 1TB sata drives for performance now and only see about1.7gb sustained and 2.4gb burst. It may be my test (and I think it may be), so I have asked one of my friends to help me set IOmeter up correctly.

The ssd's are fast for many reasons. The main one is the transfer rate of the memory. Another reason is the (almost) elimination of seek times. It is still there, but a lookup into memory is sooo much faster than waiting for the head to move to the correct location on the platter. One way to verify this is to create a ram disk using memory and then time the transfer of files into and out of the ram disk, then do the same on any HD. Make sure to use several different sized files from a small 16kb to at least a 1gb file for an accurate measure of transfer time. You can use a program called IOmeter (free) to test this theory and it will also measure seek times.

[killergamer]

I found this

Its part of an artical
Here

Prices for hard drives may also drop as flash memory evolves, he said. Flash memory supplements hard drives on hybrid drives, but as flash makes inroads into the storage market it could drop hard drive prices, Chander said. "Flash is an added bonus to bring hard drive prices down," Chander said.

Solid-state drives (SSDs), purported by many to be future replacement of hard drives, currently cost between $7 and $10 per gigabyte, which makes them much more expensive compared to magnetic desktop disk drives, which cost $0.20 to $0.30 per gigabyte, Chander said. However, SSDs have longevity and storage issues, which should keep the demand for hard drives high for many years to come, Chander said.

"Data on SSDs will exist for 10 years at the most and data on hard drives will exist for 50 years or more on a hypothetical basis depending on how data is accessed and used," Chander said. But that could change in the future, he added.

[J-Roc]

I was googling around and found that most people (enthusiasts) buy thies SSD drives to use as a PageFile drive. Apparently this is the best way to justify spending so much on them.

I have a little off-chute question here. In my system i have SATA2 RAID-0 for performance, does this effectivly double my transfer rates?

Also, if the price drops on the SSD's, it might entice the powers that be to develop a new bus technology.

[Luke122]

I was googling around and found that most people (enthusiasts) buy thies SSD drives to use as a PageFile drive. Apparently this is the best way to justify spending so much on them.

Do SSD's have the same rewrite limitations that flash memory have? I know that CF cards can be used as HDD's, but if you turn on caching it'll die within minutes, due to the limited number of writes.

If the same limitation holds true, then a pagefile would kill an SSD in minutes.

[Luke122]

I have a little off-chute question here. In my system i have SATA2 RAID-0 for performance, does this effectivly double my transfer rates?

Due to overhead, I dont think it would double it, but there should be a performance gain from it.

That being said, here's an article I'm (coincidentally) reading about this right now!